Putin’s new team brings no changes?

It remains to be seen whether Vladimir Putin's new administration will bring any changes in Russia's politics. Source: ITAR-TASS

Russia’s experts make guesses of whether Vladimir Putin’s new administration will shift all power back to the Kremlin.

President Vladimir Putin on
Tuesday appointed a slew of former ministers to the presidential
administration, reinforcing expectations that there will be no significant
policy changes for a Kremlin packed with familiar loyalists. Experts say the
result is a triumph of personal politics over the formal constitutional rules
of the game.

Read Dmitry Babich's opinion:

While Putin had made some
sacrifices in cabinet appointments, which resulted in a considerably renewed
government, his new administration features an array of loyalists who some
experts say may overshadow the novelty of a somewhat fresh Dmitry Medvedev-led
cabinet.

Among the key figures in the new Kremlin administration are former Economic
Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina and former Health and Social Services
Minister Tatyana Golikova, both of whom will serve as advisors. Key Putin
loyalist and former Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov will remain as presidential
chief of staff, while Dmitry Peskov, the president’s longtime and outspoken
press attaché, will become a deputy chief of staff.

Sergei Prikhodko, the Kremlin's longtime foreign policy advisor, left the
Kremlin for Medvedev’s cabinet as a deputy chief of staff. Meanwhile, former
Russian Ambassador to the United States Yuri Ushakov, who served as Putin’s
foreign policy advisor during his premiership, is taking Prikhodko’s place as
the president’s key foreign policy aide. Because foreign policy has
traditionally been the domain of the Russian president, Ushakov’s role as
foreign policy advisor in the White House reflected Putin’s unusually
privileged position during the past four years.

Taken together, the job swaps have left observers wondering how the balance of
power between Putin and Medvedev will play out, especially as Putin – who
served as Russia’s most influential prime minister – brings a significant
portion of his old team to the Kremlin, while the Medvedev government is
stocked in large part with lesser-known technocrats.

Experts say the news reflects a greater shift of power back toward the Kremlin,
where for four years Medvedev had failed to muster any serious clout and
Putin-centric politics had remained the order of the day. “When Medvedev was
president, his administration was far less important than Putin’s team, and
there are few people who doubt that,” said political expert Dmitry Oreshkin. “The
point is not about constitutional norms or the politics of a presidential
republic – it’s about the rules of the game. And the rules of the game are
simple: Putin is always right.”

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Yevgeny Minchenko, head of the International Institute of Political Expertise,
agrees that the wholesale transfer of Putin’s former colleagues from the
government to the Kremlin sends signals that the key power constituencies
remain based on personal loyalty rather than formal office. “The logic of the
system holds that while people can go from one post to another – or they can
begin to create groups of influence around themselves – the basic format of the
Putin ‘politburo’ will not change much,” he said.

However, according to Pavel Danilin, the Kremlin-friendly editor in chief of
the Kreml.org news portal, the
advisory posts within the presidential administration are either decorative
roles or transitional jobs given to bureaucrats who are slated to move on
elsewhere within the system.

The retention of figures such as former Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and
Peskov may be prime examples, since both, though under fire for their recent
actions – Nurgaliyev for the recent wave of rampant police abuse and Peskov for
his harsh comments against the anti-Kremlin protesters – remain Putin’s close
allies and incorporated into key decision-making procedures.